Cold outreach is becoming harder to justify in modern B2B sales. Automated emails flood inboxes, reply rates continue to decline, and sales teams are pressured to send more messages just to stay visible.
Despite significant spending on sales automation, many teams struggle to translate activity into meaningful conversations or revenue. Helsinki-based startup Homie believes the problem is approach.
Instead of scaling cold messages, the company helps sales teams grow through warm, trusted introductions within their networks.
Homie has launched publicly with €1M in pre-seed funding, led by Superhero Capital, with participation from Antler. The funding supports the company’s launch and expansion across Europe and North America, as well as deeper integrations with CRM and sales tools.
The company has raised €1.2 million to date through a day-zero funding round and Finnish government grants, prior to the current funding round. The current valuation is €7.2 million.
Turning networks into a pipeline
Founded in 2024 through Antler’s founder residency in Helsinki, Homie helps B2B teams connect with decision-makers through verified relationships across employees, customers, investors, and partners.
The platform identifies warm paths to buyers and turns word-of-mouth into a measurable revenue channel. More than 250 companies already use Homie, including teams at Revenue Hero, Lorikeet, and Circuit.ai.
Rather than pushing volume, the startup positions itself around trust and relevance in a market overwhelmed by automation.
Rooted in personal frustration
The company’s origins are rooted in personal frustration with modern sales models. Markku Vuorinen (CEO) experienced the breakdown of traditional B2B revenue playbooks in his previous growth leadership role at a SaaS scale-up.
Cold outbound had become saturated and ineffective, while paid media costs were rising every year with diminishing returns. Despite strong execution, the company was consistently missing ambitious growth targets.
Digging deeper into CRM data and sales notes, Markku noticed a clear pattern: deals involving a personal connection closed at significantly higher rates. These connections included customer referrals, warm introductions, and new hires who brought relevant relationships from their networks.
The more he looked at the data, the clearer it became that this wasn’t an edge case; it was a repeatable signal hiding in plain sight across the pipeline.
“Why is the most effective sales motion treated as unscalable and manual? That realisation became the foundation of the company: building a way to systematically identify, activate, and scale relationship-driven revenue using data already sitting inside modern teams,” says Markku.
What about diversity?
When we asked about diversity, Vuorinen told TFN, “The founding team consists of Finnish males. Beyond the founders, the team includes: One founding employee who is an immigrant and now a Finnish citizen; One Indian team member working remotely. The company is early-stage, and team diversity is expected to broaden as hiring scales internationally.”
Navigating a young and developing market
According to Markku, the startup is currently navigating a young and developing market that lacks a clearly defined product category.
“There are a few emerging players exploring similar angles, including Commsor, Happenstance and CTD, which are also experimenting with new ways to surface and activate relationships,” he says.
That said, the biggest competitor isn’t another startup. It’s the status quo: outdated, volume-driven sales playbooks, mass cold outbound, generic sequences, and rising paid media spend despite clear evidence they’re becoming less effective,” adds Markku.
“There’s been plenty of hype around using AI in sales, but not much meaningful progress. Most teams ended up automating noise instead of trust and amplifying quantity over quality. Homie takes a quieter, smarter approach, using technology to make real connections scalable. That’s the shift the market has been waiting for,” said Juha Ruohonen, General Partner at Superhero Capital.
